you are a smart man having waited until now to pick it up. Considering how awful the last five months have been post-release with bugs and balance issues I'm lamenting not waiting until saletime myself. This'll be the last Relic title (especially RTS) I pick up on release day, for sure.

Some of these things you've mentioned are coming - they just weren't in 1.4.2. Dropping back to 1.3.2 is troubling and I suspect very few are going to be playing the game until the final patch hits. No developer wants no one playing their game five months after release, for whatever reason, so this is a big mistake on Relic's part IMO.

Relic definitely has its hands full with this game. I suspect that their post-release plans were ambitious but did not take into account how much work this game still needed when it released. Having never really developed a product quite like this before I also suspect they're experiencing a lot of "firsts" - dealing with GFWL and patch turnaround, trying to balance a game that just wasn't done, and so forth. The effort's been admirable but ultimately I never expected the game to be so in flux and inherently unstable 5 months after release.

BF2 was a lot of fun back in the day but its biggest failing is that it never managed to properly balance the rock/paper/scissors interactions. Choppers and aircraft own everything, vehicles own everything else, and you only generally go infantry because you can't find a vehicle. You ended up with a bunch of antitank guys running around trying to accomplish everything and... it just didn't work particularly well. Special Forces helped remedy that somewhat withthe removal of planes but certain maps still suffered due to chopper whoredom.

I really liked the naval combat a lot myself but it's likely never coming back. DICE nixed it in BF2 due to griefing in 1942 (people getting into the ship driver's seat and then driving it off the map, depriving teams of spawn points, prematurely ending rounds, etc).

I agree it is too soon, but everybody seems okay with a new Call of Duty being released each year, so when Valve does it it's somehow a crime?

I definitely am not. Played the original Call of Duty, then the sequel, and haven't touched any of the subsequent games. Two games was more than enough of me to tire of the heavy duty on-rails gameplay those games offer. I downloaded (yeah, pirated) the 5th one just to see how multiplayer was for a LAN party we were planning and it was uninstalled and deleted within a couple of hours. *shrug* Obviously some people are still gaga over them because they continue making them.

Add me to the list of people disappointed in the longevity of L4D. There's a good reason TF2 is getting so much more attention - it's an objective-oriented game with varied game types, not a game developed around a particular cinematic experience like L4D. Additionally, with the class-based system, it's a game where developing new and interesting content is intuitive enough that they can keep up the flow, improving the game without completely changing the original design.

That said, for all you people lamenting the lack of real DLC for L4D, what sorts of things can you imagine as DLC that wouldn't completely change or dilute the original experience? New weapons? More maps? More game modes? The problem as I see it is that even if you do add all this stuff, the end product will still revolve around the basic cinematic experience of zombie killing. The game was wonderful as a proof of concept and perhaps as a tech demo (AI director and all the other technology they improvised for the game) but once that novelty wears out there really is nothing left.

welp, speaking for myself, I LIKE earning them through the achievements. Most of the achievements are entertaining enough and I'm patient enough to wait for the unlocks. I just wish they'd stuck to their guns and given us an option of how we wanted to approach the unlocks, rather than making them independent of the achievements globally.

Something interesting in the changelog - apparently unlocks aren't tied to achievements anymore. I thought at one point they mentioned they were going to allow the people who enjoyed unlocking via achievements to still do and the whiners to get them by other means? Bah.

i generally don't play for a week or two after major class updates to avoid all the asshattery, and am planning to follow suit here as well as I'm expecting Retardo Nation with all the spies and snipers that'll be running around for a while. Looking forward to checking it out once the furor dies out.